Tips and Tools of the Social Media Trade, by Hal Grieb

Some call me an expert on social media and emergency management, I just call myself a heavy user. I love using new technology when it can help augment current tools in helping people stay safe especially when the tools are free! I have been asked by many how I automated emergency alerts on Twitter and Facebook Fan Pages. It’s not too hard and again, it’s free!

Here are the steps:

Create a “secret” www.Twittermail.com email address that only you will know. With Twittermail.com, anything you send to the secret email will be posted to twitter, no matter what the length (it creates a link to messages longer than 140 characters), or who sent it (hence why it’s secret).

Create a separate iNWS account (http://inws.wrh.noaa.gov/) for your Twittermail.com email address, you will need to contact the iNWS team to get them to manually approve the email address.

Test it out. Send an email to your secret Twittermail email, it should auto post to twitter then be pulled to your Facebook without you doing anything else.

Monitor to ensure the system is working.

*If you don’t like iNWS or have a different automated email alert, you still use the exact same process. Just be sure whatever automated message service you use, when it’s posted automatically, that it still makes sense. Some email alerts may read weird and not do any good to your users.

Additional PIO Use for Twittermail

Another great way to use the twittermail.com email is to give it to your PIOs; they can then email any info, at any length they want or need to it, and it will be posted to Twitter then Facebook instantly. They don’t even need to have an account! Just be sure you have some sort of SOP or policy and address it in your communications plan.